Anybody else watch this on the Discovery Channel? The CGI work is nice, and the interviews with the scientists are nice, but I guess I’m too much of a space geek to find a lot of credible. (Surprise!)
The first problem I have is with the probes themselves. They enter the planet’s atmosphere using craft which look like variations of the space shuttle. Uh, yeah. You send a probe 6 lightyears from Earth and you use something as bulky as the space shuttle to deliver it to the surface. I don’t think so. Then, when the actual probes are deployed (there’s 3 shuttles, 2 survive, each one contains 1 probe), most of the shuttle is simply discarded. Seems to me that it’d make more sense to have those do something if you were actually going to use them. That way if the mobile probes end up getting clobbered by something on the planet, you’ve still got something there, returning data. I mean, it did take 42 years (according to the program) for the probes to get there, so you’d want to maximize your return. IMHO, a whole bunch of tiny little probes are going to be better than a couple of big probes. There’s an orbiting mothership/relay station around the planet, which is what brought the probes there, and when one of the probes goes AWOL, the narrator seems to indicate that it’s impossible for the mothership to find it, because of how small the probe is. Again, I don’t think so. Given that the program takes place X number of years in the future (plus another 42 years for the probes to get where they’re going), image resolution capabilities are going to be advanced enough for the mothership to spot the probe easy. I mean, for Og’s sake we’ve apparently managed to find the Mars Polar Lander that got lost, and we haven’t even managed to send anything to another solar system yet. Are we supposed to believe that we’ve figured out how to create sophisticated AI systems, travel at 20% of the speed of light, and other such wonders, but have lost the ability to make a decent camera?
The next problem I have is with some of the giant lifeforms. Yeah, I know that the planet has a lighter gravity than Earth’s, and a slightly different atmospheric composition than Earth’s, but it’s not necessiarily Earth’s higher gravity and atmosphere which select against giant lifeforms. It has more to do with what the environment can support. Big creatures demand a lot of food, and the planet in the show appears to be a place slightly more inviting to life than Mars, so smaller creatures, not giant 7 storey tall creatures seem more likely.
That was my general feeling. If they were going to do this program they might as well have tried harder to come up with a reasonable and workable scheme. And while I have to admit a fondness for the sea striders: enough with the giants.
Although it wasn’t the biggest problem, the thing that bothered me the most was the gyrosprinter (I think that’s what it was called. Gyro-something, anyway). The one guy was talking about how odd an “adaptation” the fused front and back legs were and how you’d never see it on an Earth creature, and all I could think about was the fact that, while it made the creature look kind of cool, I cannot conceive of an environment in which it would be advantageous to lose the benefits of being a quadruped without actually gaining the benefits of being a biped. So, duh you wouldn’t see it on an Earth creature, and please don’t claim to be including it in the program for any reason other than that it looks neat.
And why did most of the creatures have horn-things that blocked their mouths? And what’s with all the critters that had hind legs but not forelimbs? And facial crests that had holes through them?
You forgot to mention the fact that one of the extremely huge creatures had an extremely poor way of getting nourished: It sat in the ground and let the soil feed it.
As for the sea strider, I suppose I could see where it gets its food source from, pretty much taking a “mouth”-ful with every step.
The show could’ve been better if it wasn’t limited to one world, and didn’t have the whole “plot” with Leo and Ike.
Oh: and I was kind of annoyed when the Balboa probe disappeared and it just didn’t matter. Ike and Leo were supposedly programmed with complementary “personalities”, which means that the probes were not completely interchangeable as they seemed to be saying when Balboa burned up in the atmosphere. What was Balboa’s personality? How would it have fit in with the other two? Something tells me that they just didn’t think about that when constructing the plotline.
Well in the end it was probably for the best, because he was programmed to destroy all alien life he came into contact with, then turn on his two brothers. The scientists that programmed him were kind of drunk at the time, and by time they recovered from the hangover, he’d already been shot into space.
They encountered a few big bags of methane gas which exhibited signs of intelligence, and responded to the hologram. As one approached Ike, he fired off one of his camera discs to “assess the threat,” which the aliens took to be a hostile action. The sattelite lost signal after that. Then after that, it was just scientists talking about a bunch of things related to life and such.
It was fun to watch, but I kept on rolling my eyes…
Why would the probes launch weather balloons? Wouldn’t the ORBITING SPACECRAFT be better suited to tracking the weather (and launching a couple of satellites to track the weather?
The animals were too much like Earth animals. That’s largely part because of the wiring - it’s hard (some would say impossible) to imagine something truly alien, but did they all have to have (eg.) bilateral symmetry?
I could go on and on, of course, but it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
I enjoyed it, but thought, yeah, these aliens are hardly alien.
Maybe a little more time and energy into the aliens rather than the bots
would have been nice.
I did like it and hope to see more of it. A series of episodes where a cast of people
or robots go to seek out new life and new civilizations, to go bodily where no one
has gone before… That would be cool.
Weather data is more than just clouds and windspeed, the only sort of thing you can tell from sats. Weather ballons are really the best way to get stratified info on temp, particulates and humidity at all levels of the atmosphere. Makes sense to me. I mean, we have sats up around Earth right now, but meteorologists still launch ballons regularly.
I guess I didn’t mind the storyline as much as others; sure, it was kinda hokey, but otherwise they might as well have just shown a series of animals. And I liked the fact that they at least tried to inject a little “realism” into it by having two of the three probes lost within the first 45 minutes.
That being said, I got the distinct impression that the aliens were basically drawn up first and then the science behind them was retrofitted to their design. And, to be honest, outside of maybe the electrical mushroom field or the ameobic sea, nothing really seemed all that alien. It was just a bunch of animals that had some different looking appendages.
And I too got sick of everything being so damn…giant.
In the original book, it was a 24th century, manned, joint human-alien expedition to Darwin IV. I guess they had to pare it down a bit.
A little note: also in the original, none of the creatures encountered had eyes. Which makes you wonder how the Eosapiens saw the hologram that the probe projected.
